Quotes By Anna Quindlen

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.

The problem... is emblematic of what hasn't changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened; opportunities evolved. Law, institutions, corporations moved forward. But many minds did not.

All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren't valued in women.

If there is anyone who's living the work of the New Testament, it's the nuns of the Catholic church and not the Catholic hierarchy.

A finished person is a boring person.

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.

If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.

I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pill box hat and matching coat.

I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

Somewhere between a third and a quarter of all people living in America today were born between 1946 and 1965 and if you think you're tired of hearing about us, you should try being one of us.

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.

When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.

In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.

After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.

Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.

You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.

Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

But it's important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated.

The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?

I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.

There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too.

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.